Christa Pike is in a Nashville-area hospital on a ventilator and unconscious after surviving two doses of a lethal injection during her execution in Tennessee. Her arms are burned and blistered. Her lawyers said they believed problems with the IV lines caused the pentobarbital to flow into her body instead of her bloodstream.
In the gallery watching the death chamber were the mother and stepfather of Colleen Slemmer, who was tortured and murdered by Pike and her then boyfriend after they had met at a job camp for troubled teenagers on January 12, 1995.
Witnesses describe failed execution
Colleen's mother, May Martinez, said she "didn't get justice for my daughter" after the botched execution. Speaking to People, she said, "I want to go kill Christa. How's that?"
Stepfather Raul Martinez Jr described the scene during the failed execution: "She just lay there. She moved her toes a lot." He continued, "We waited about three minutes and they said, 'We're going to give her another dose'. They opened another bag, and she was still picking up her head and moving around." He could "hear the sounds of her snoring or gurgling" through a microphone in the room.
Family's grief and Pike's history
Colleen's mother added: "If I could have gotten in that room, I would have taken the box cutter and cut her up like she did Colleen." She said, "Not a day goes by, or a minute goes by that I do not think about Colleen. Holidays are the worst. Colleen's birthday was last week. She would have been 51."
Pike killed classmate Colleen in a jealous rage when she was 18 and later became one of the youngest women to be sent to death row. Following the killing, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, her lawyers said.
Investigation and pause on executions
"It took me numerous years to even realize the gravity of what I'd done. Even more to accept how many lives I affected. I took the life of someone's child, sister, friend. It sickens me now to think I had the ability to commit such a crime," Pike said in an earlier clemency petition.
Slemmer's body was found with a pentagram carved onto her chest and with her head caved in by a piece of asphalt. The pentagram attracted widespread media attention at the time due to fears of 'satanic panic' which swept through the US in the 1980s and 1990s. There were plenty of conspiracy theories which were unsubstantiated that there was Satanic ritual abuse across the country.
Since 2022, Tennessee has carried out just four of the more than 140 executions that have taken place nationwide, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre. Republican Gov. Bill Lee paused executions in the state following the unsuccessful attempt to put Pike to death and ordered an independent investigation into what went wrong, as both critics and supporters of the death penalty called for changes.
